Bike Back

bikeIn 1989, when I was fifteen years old, I had a terrible bike accident. Following my friend and her father through a wide intersection in the final moments of our yellow light, I rode my bike directly into a car that began moving forward just as our light turned red. As I saw that the driver was speeding up and that I would almost certainly collide with her, I did what many people do, instinctively, when they’re frightened: I closed my eyes.

The last thing I remember from that crash was seeing that my front bike tire was about to hit the side of the moving car. The events that followed were a series of flashes: seeing my bike twenty feet away from where I lay on the street, the EMT’s face above me; answering the question of who our president was as the ambulance sped toward the hospital; my mother’s face in the emergency room. I had a concussion, stitches on my scalp, and a compression fracture in one of my vertebrae. The friend who had been behind me on the bike ride said she watched me collide with the car and fly high into the air, landing heavily on my back and the back of my head. It was the 80s; no one wore bike helmets.

I often think of this as I ride my current bicycle around town. I recall the crash from my childhood and even remember the aftermath in the hospital. My back still twinges from time to time, and hair never grew in again over the spot where I had stitches. Still, I love to ride my bike. I love the way a hot day turns cooler with the wind I create on two wheels. I love the freedom of choosing alleys instead of roads, of avoiding traffic, of parking anywhere I can safely lock my bike. I love my bright blue bicycle itself, and the quirky helmet that all my friends can identify from afar. I love the inner child who tugs at my shirt when I get on, proud to keep herself balanced on the pedals and thrilled to be moving faster than on foot but still using only the power of her own two legs.

In short, that bike accident — violent, frightening, memorable — has not ruined my love of bicycling. So, how can we know, as parents, which experiences will wreak havoc on a child’s future interactions and which will be unable to change what is fundamental? Continue Reading…

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The Gift of No Dessert

Swallow, My Sunshine: Blueberries in a bowl
My daughter pauses on her way to return the jar of honey to the cabinet, angles her body toward the counter, and reaches for her buzzing phone. Absentmindedly, one hand still holding the honey while the other wraps itself around the phone, her gaze travels down to the messages that have come in while we were eating dinner. I wait to see what happens next.

As I suspected, the honey drifts toward the counter, set down as the connection between my eleven-year-old and her new friends from middle school crackles back into existence again. She is absorbed, and I turn back to the sink to finish the dishes. Ten minutes later, I dry the last pot and announce, “Bedtime, kiddo. Up you go.”

“BUT!” she says, loudly, “I was gonna have DESSERT!”

“No time left,” I answer, squeezing her shoulders. “You chose to look at your phone for the last ten minutes. Put the honey away and let’s go upstairs.”

“BUT!” she repeats. “I’m HUNGRY!”

I look at the time and mentally inventory the fridge and pantry for the quickest thing. “There’s no time for regular dessert. You can eat one yogurt squeeze or a handful of blueberries. You have five minutes.”

And then, as she opens the fridge quickly and sighs, I take in her long legs, strong shoulders, and thick hair, and I am grateful for the three hundredth time that five minutes is plenty of time for whichever she chooses. Not so long ago, there would have been neither phone time, nor the choice of fruit, nor the option to begin eating anything with so little time to spare before bedtime.

Not so long ago, my daughter Sammi could barely eat anything in five minutes. Continue Reading…

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Hearts Break for Years

Swallow, My Sunshine: The Short Family Tragedy

I have anxiety and nightmares. Certain smells and hallways trigger memories every single time. Yet sometimes the memories return out of nowhere like a beeping sound from someone’s phone reminding you of the monitor alarms. None of this ever got easier…

Those words were written this spring by Megan Short, the mother of a two year old daughter Willow who received a heart transplant as a newborn. In a special post on the Mended Little Hearts of Philadelphia web site, she shares feelings any parent whose child experienced medical trauma can understand: fear and overwhelm, and the sense that her life would never be the same. Any parent who has sent a child — particularly a baby — into the operating room for major surgery can identify with the memories she shares.

What, thankfully, seldom happens to those parents and their families is what happened to the Short family last weekend. In a horrific turn of events that may never been totally understood or unravelled, the entire Short family was found dead in their home, a murder-suicide that took the lives of the parents and their three children, including two-year-old Willow, her transplanted heart lost to a family’s untreated emotional trauma. Continue Reading…

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My Bruised Birthday Heart

My daughter Sammi turns eleven tomorrow, and when I wake up, I will immediately start down the same well-trod path of many mothers: I will relive the day of her birth.

debibirthMy realization of this tradition began with my own mother retelling the story of my entry into the world, something she did with diminishing success over the years. As a child, I remember her tale of the planned induction beginning with the Chinese meal she ate the night before. She always smiled and rolled her eyes in mock-overwhelm as she described the obstetrician who lived across the street from the hospital and who padded back and forth all night to check on her as she labored, wearing his bathrobe. She always laughed when she remembered the paperboy poking his head in the door to sell her a paper a few hours after I was born, only to do a double-take at her feet still up in stirrups as the nurse tended to her underside. As the years have gone on, my mother muses over all these details less and less. After more than forty years of remembering, there are now some pieces of the story that I remember better than she does, just from the repetition.

My oldest child — my daughter Ronni — came into the world memorably, and I begin the memories of her birth more than a day before her birthday. I can recount it by the hours, still, fourteen years later. Although much was painful, and much was frightening, I recall the event with joy and celebration. I labored, I pushed, I struggled, and eventually I felt the indescribable sensation of my child passing through the space between my hip bones, my pelvis, and into the world. The beauty of it brings tears to my eyes, still. I can access those emotions easily, quickly, and feel washed in love and wholeness, knowing as I do now that it was the beginning of a relationship marked by tenderness and discovery.

Sammi’s birth is so much harder to retell.

Sammi 2 days

She was born a week late by emergency c-section, inexplicably tiny and riddled with health issues. For years after that day, there was seldom a break from worrying about her, seldom a moment when my body wasn’t called on to continue carrying her somehow — to nurse her, hold her, rock her, drive her to the hospital, drive her to doctors’ offices, administer medicine, hold a breathing mask over her face in the middle of the night, pull underwear up her legs under a hospital gown. I was constantly peering at her ears, her mouth, her nose, checking to see if her ribs were protruding more than last week, literally and figuratively weighing her. I fed her with the intensity of a brand new mother, always.

In many ways, Sammi’s birth — and my labor — went on for nine years. It started on the day of her birth and stopped one beautiful day in October of 2014 when her good health shone clearly and she was, for me, finally born. Just like other labors, in those nine years were moments of pain I didn’t think I was really able to bear and moments of rest when I gathered strength for the surges that were coming. Just like other labors, sometimes I begged anyone nearby for help and sometimes I silently clenched my jaw and squeezed the hand of my husband alone. Just like other labors, I was often selfish and believed the struggle was mine alone, and there were other times when I remembered that Sammi was trying just as hard as she could and that my husband was watching both of us, helpless to do more than offer comfort.

And just like other labors, it finally ended.

Remembering the day she was born is hard. It was the beginning of an uphill climb, and when you climb a mountain, you celebrate the summit with far more joy than you recall the moment you took the first step. There is too much journey in the middle. Still, I know that the day Sammi came into this world is important. It did not have the funny cast of characters my mother remembers from my birth, and it did not include the stirring, empowering moment of my older daughter’s birth, but it was the first hard leg of a journey that we both weathered in the end. What it lacks in positive imagery, I suppose it makes up for in the stuff of character-building.

I love Sammi with a fierceness I cannot describe, with a quality different — though not more or less — than what accompanies my love for Ronni. Sammi and I were in labor together for years. She may grow to forget as much of it as my mother now forgets about my birth, but I will never forget how our bodies were linked, how we strained, and how when it was done, there we were: born.

born

Happy birthday, Sammi. I’m achingly grateful that you are here.

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Let Me Take You There

doorA hundred lifetimes ago, in undergraduate and graduate writing workshops, I studied the ways that tense and perspective change the tone of a story. When it comes to my emotions and my words, I find that tense and perspective are the best tools I have for bringing readers into the story quickly. For example: What happens when I tell this in the past tense — “My daughter could barely breathe” — versus when I tell it in present tense: “My daughter can barely breathe”? What happens when I tell a story in first person (“I was frightened“) versus when I tell them the story in second person (“You will be far colder than one would expect“)?

For me, past tense offers distance. As I write in past tense, I feel separated from the events. I can write without getting too caught up in the moment as I experienced it in real time. I am calm, almost clinical in my descriptions. It reminds me of the unwavering steadiness I’ve been able to construct in moments of real trauma by simply breathing deeply, disassociating from my emotions, and behaving like a soldier on a mission. In past tense, I am a reporter, and even when I report on the raw and furious emotions in our family’s history, it is with a detached, analytical eye.

Present tense is where I get you invested. I am here, in the sun-filled living room, with the baby in my lap who is struggling to breathe. Or, I am lying on the floor of my basement in the cold dark, and I think, for a moment, that I can hear my screaming daughter two floors above me as I sink into the drugged sleep of a woman past the edge of exhaustion. You are watching me in real time. Neither of us knows what comes next. We are both — writer and reader — in my mystery. Continue Reading…

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